your brain is lying to you about where "you" are

[still_confused_99]

saw this paper from Northeastern recently — researchers basically proved the brain constructs a sense of self-location that doesn't match physical reality. they used vr and sensory manipulation to reliably induce out-of-body sensations. the brain decides "you" are somewhere else and it feels completely real.

i've felt something similar during deep qigong standing practice. not full OBE, but this weird dissolution of the boundary between my body and the space around it. my teachers always said this was chi expanding outward. now i'm not so sure what to call it.

Carl Jung talked about the ego as a constructed boundary — not something inherent but something the psyche builds for orientation. if that construction is neurologically fragile enough to be disrupted by vr goggles and conflicting sensory inputs, it raises questions about a lot of experiences we treat as mystical.

the Hanged Man in tarot comes to mind. suspended upside down, perspective shifted, seeing things from an angle the ego doesn't normally allow. i used to read that card as purely symbolic. now i wonder if it's pointing at something the nervous system can actually do — flip your reference point.

here's what bothers me though. when tcm practitioners talk about meridians and energy moving outside the body, we might be describing genuine neurological events but using the wrong framework. the sensation is real. the explanation might be wrong. i've had acupuncture sessions where i felt something radiating well beyond the needle point, almost like my awareness extended a foot past my skin. powerful stuff. but was that "energy" or just my parietal lobe recalibrating spatial awareness?

i'm not trying to dismiss inner alchemy practices. they work for me. my sleep is better, my recovery from training is faster, something changes. but i think we do ourselves a disservice when we refuse to engage with neuroscience that might actually explain how these practices work.

anyone else here straddling this line? using energy frameworks because they're practical but secretly suspecting the mechanism is mostly neurological?

[Noetic]

This is precisely the kind of post that makes this forum worthwhile. You are doing what most people refuse to do: holding your subjective experience and the neuroscience literature in both hands simultaneously and letting the tension exist rather than resolving it prematurely.

The Northeastern study you referenced is not fringe — it is consistent with a body of work on the vestibular-proprioceptive integration system in the temporoparietal junction. The out-of-body induction via sensory conflict works because self-location is computed, not directly perceived. The brain runs a Bayesian estimation process weighting visual, proprioceptive, and vestibular signals, and when those signals conflict, the prior assumption shifts. That is not "making things up" — it is updating a model with noisy data.

Your qigong experience might map onto this as a gradual recalibration of that same estimation process. The "chi expanding outward" phenomenology could be the subjective signature of reduced precision in the bodily self-model — which in meditative contexts is considered progress, not pathology. Where the VR study induces this artificially and abruptly, sustained body-based practice may achieve it organically.

I would push back slightly on the either/or framing of "energy vs. parietal lobe." Those are not competing explanations. They are the same phenomenon described at different levels of abstraction. The question is not which framework is "correct" but which one is useful for your practice.

[Samsara]

Your qigong experience of boundary dissolution points toward something central in Buddhist practice. In the Vijñapti-matra (Mind-Only) tradition of Yogacara Buddhism, the sense of a bounded self is understood as a mental construction — the manas-vijñapti, the self-grasping consciousness that takes the five aggregates as "I" and "mine." What you are describing in standing practice may be a temporary quieting of that grasping.

The Tibetan tradition calls this tnang sem — naked awareness, the direct experience of consciousness without the overlay of conceptual self-referencing. It does not require out-of-body experience per se. It requires that the subtle contraction of self-reference relax.

Your question about whether to trust energy frameworks or neurological explanations brings to mind the Buddha's parable of the poisoned arrow. A man shot by an arrow demands to know the caste of the person who shot him, the type of poison, the wood of the shaft — and dies before any useful question is answered. The Buddha's point was that some questions are productive and some are not. Whether your qigong sensation is "chi" or "parietal lobe recalibration" may be a question of the latter sort. The practice works. The explanation is secondary.

[fresh_window_67]

"when tcm practitioners talk about meridians and energy moving outside the body, we might be describing genuine neurological events but using the wrong framework"

I keep seeing this move in these discussions and I think it's worth pulling apart. You're assuming there's a "correct" framework (neuroscience) and a "wrong" one (TCM/energy), and the task is just to translate between them. But what if that premise is backwards?

The Northeastern VR study you mentioned — I looked it up, it's from Aniruddh Patel's lab group, though I might be confusing researchers. Either way, studies like that demonstrate that self-location is constructible. They show the brain can be tricked. But here's the thing: showing that a system can be hacked doesn't tell you what the system is for or what its normal operating state looks like. I can mess with the GPS on your phone and make it think you're in Tokyo. That doesn't mean your actual location was ever "just a GPS construction" in the first place.

I think you're doing what I called out in another thread — assuming the map is the territory. The neurological description is a map. It's incredibly useful for certain purposes. But you've already decided it's the real explanation and everything else is just a quaint approximation that needs updating. That's a philosophical choice, not a scientific finding.

"i think we do ourselves a disservice when we refuse to engage with neuroscience"

Sure, but I'd flip it: I think we do ourselves a disservice when we assume neuroscience has explanatory priority over first-person experience. The parietal lobe explanation you offered — "just my parietal lobe recalibrating spatial awareness" — the word "just" is doing a ton of work there. You're saying the sensation is real, then immediately flattening it into a mechanistic account that by definition can't capture what the experience was actually like from the inside.

I'm a software engineer. I spend my day working with abstraction layers. Microservices, APIs, event queues — these are all frameworks that describe what's happening at different levels. A database write is "really" electrical signals in silicon, but if I tried to debug a distributed system by reasoning about electron flows, I'd get nowhere. The framework that's "wrong" from one level can be exactly right from another.

Your qigong practice works. The boundary dissolution you describe is repeatable, has predictable effects on sleep and recovery, and responds to training. That's not a problem to be solved by finding the "real" neurological mechanism. That is a valid framework already. The neuroscience isn't the ground truth that makes it legitimate. It's just a different abstraction layer.

I'm not anti-neuroscience. I read prediction processing papers for fun. But I think the move from "we can disrupt this experience in a lab" to "therefore the experience is constructed and the construction is the whole story" is a non-sequitur that people keep getting away with because it sounds scientific.